The Mycroft Holmes Casebook by David Dickinson

Author:David Dickinson [Dickinson, David]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Endeavour Press
Published: 2014-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Mycroft Holmes and Murder at the Diogenes Club

“What about this man coming our way with the umbrella?”

“Very red in the face, sir. The man drinks too much.”

“What else?”

“Indian Civil Service, I fancy. A Collector in an Indian state possibly, maybe a Magistrate.”

“And?”

“He may have fallen on hard times, our man. Money not what it was, I fancy, sir.”

“Any more?”

“Lives in the country, sir. Probably up to London for the day.”

“You are making progress indeed, Tobias. I am pleased with you.” Mycroft Holmes, Auditor of all Government Departments, and his young assistant Tobias were sitting in the bow window of the Strangers Room of the Diogenes Club in London’s Pall Mall, the only room in the club where you were allowed to speak. This was the third lesson in deductive reasoning as practised by both Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes, a technique that enabled them both to reveal the character of strangers walking down the street or suspects in their investigations.

“Tell me, pray, Tobias, on what you based your deductions in this matter?”

“Well, sir, the man had a very red face, some of which may have been acquired in India. But he had great blotches on his cheeks which are usually caused by too much drinking. Claret perhaps?”

“And the Indian Civil Service?”

“Why, sir, the man was wearing an Old Haileybury tie. I have been studying those booklets you gave me from that shop in Jermyn Street about Old School and London Club Ties. Even though the school was no longer owned by the East India Company after the Mutiny, it re-opened as a public school with strong links to the Raj. And his bearing was upright and dignified, sir, so I thought he must have been in a position of some authority like a Collector.”

“Hard times, Tobias?”

“Well, sir, the suit was old and the material was turning shiny, which shows it is no longer young. And I’m sure his collar had been turned. I used to watch my mother turn my father’s collars when I was a little boy, sir.”

“Excellent. And your last deduction about the fellow being up from the country?”

“Why, sir, there was the tip of a train ticket sticking out of his waistcoat pocket.”

“You could have gone further, Tobias. The ticket was of the type issued by the Great Western Railway. My brother brought out a little monograph about the different types of train tickets similar to his work on the differing sorts of cigar ash. Remind me to give you a copy. And I fancy the blotches on our man’s cheeks may have been caused by whisky and soda rather than claret. Purists would always say that good Bordeaux would not travel well to the sub-continent, too damned hot.”

Tobias always felt like one of the two boys in John Everett Millais’s painting of the Boyhood of Raleigh in these deduction seminars. Two young boys, Walter Raleigh and his brother, in fact the painter’s sons, George and Everett, are listening very closely to an old sailor with a bright yellow shirt and short red pantaloons.

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